Webinaires Webinar: Integrating health into urban planning

The Health Equity Impact Assessment (HEIA) Community of Interest invites you to its upcoming webinar, “Integrating health into urban planning.” The webinar will describe how health is being integrated into the urban planning process in Quebec City using the Health Impact Assessment (HIA) tool.

Similar to the HEIA tool, the Health Impact Assessment (HIA) is a precise decision-support tool that enables users to consider health in the development of policies, programs, or projects, in particular outside the health sector. The Ottawa Charter for health promotion recognizes that decisions in non-health sectors often have an impact on health and that it is therefore necessary to build healthy intersectoral public policies (WHO, 1986). The Charter states:

“The systematic assessment of the health impact of a rapidly changing environment—particularly in areas of technology, work, energy production, and urbanization—is essential and must be followed by action to ensure positive benefit to the health of the public.”

The webinar is suitable for those who have a basic understanding of the HEIA tool. If HEIA is new to you, watch this short video to get a basic introduction.

Register for the webinar.

For more information: http://eenet.ca/article/webinar-integrating-health-urban-planning 

The presenters

Alexandre Lebel has a background in physical geography and in geographical information systems. He did his PhD in urban planning at Laval University on the social and spatial health disparities, and on the geography of overweight in Quebec (2010). He further studied these topics during a postdoctorate at the Harvard School of Public Health (2012) using multilevel analysis.

He currently teaches public health at the Graduate School of Urban Planning and Land Management at Laval University, and is developing a research platform on population health and obesity prevention at the Quebec Heart and Lung Institute Research Center.

His research program includes work on obesity prevention, developing a web-based data collection application on the school environment. He is working actively with Quebec’s municipalities to implement the health impact assessment (HIA) in the urban planning process.